The “Covid is over” propaganda. Covid is not over. It is still killing people, still disabling people, still giving people lifelong autoimmune conditions and other long-term health problems. “Covid is over” Is code for “Go back to work so the capitalist class can reap the rewards of your labor, no matter how dead or disabled you become in the process.”
I don’t really know what to make of it to be honest. I always knew it would be “over” before all of the circumstances that made it an emergency were over. Actually I was very surprised it continued to be taken seriously for as long as it did at least here in Australia because I assumed political and economic interests would kick in after only a very short while I guess because of my usual cynicism.
However, part of the trouble with the whole thing is that there’s no agreement on what over would really mean and no acceptable set of preconditions that could reasonably be set to define it. It’s very unlikely we’ll ever eradicate the virus, so we need to become endemic, but it’s also very contagious and frequently mutates. We can set the threshold of the point at which health services can keep on top of cases but that’s dependent on different contexts in different countries and regions and also politics. We can help that along tremendously with vaccines but that has to keep going and be taken by whopping majorities of people forever. Take up was good, but helped in large part by being an emergency and if it needs to be an emergency to achieve that then it will never be “over”. It’s also difficult because while critics and conspiracy theorists kept pointing out how the mortality rate was comparatively low against other infections diseases, the comparatively heavy (albeit with a shaky start) public measures to combat the disease could be justified by both the numbers of people vulnerable to it making the total number of deaths high and the fact that we posessed means we previously didn’t to respond to such a pandemic scenario which made us ethically obliged to do so. That’s all entirely reasonable justification for being in a state of varying forms of “emergency” which allowed for temporary and extraordinary measures but it begins to wear away with time as the consequences of the measures begin to manifest their own harms and ironically as our measures begin to see some success.
It’s a hell of a problem because diseases just don’t fit with the way we go about solving problems which is more like a project with an end date and a budget and a tally of easily identified harms and benefits. Unfortunately it means COVID will inevitably be “over” because we say it is before it ever actually can truly be and it kind of puts us on track for more waves of it and also for forgetting about and leaving behind people still contracting or suffering lasting consequences from it.
But I don’t really see a solution. It really does have to be over at some point. People genuinely can’t be expected to be worrying about this forever and eventually will tire of caution and tire of restrictions and as well they should since we’d consider it madness to still be in a state of health emergency with temporary restrictions to freedom of movement and business and mandatory medical procedures and constant news broadcasts with the latest case numbers for the Spanish Flu pandemic, it even the 2003 SARS virus.
Well said. I see a considerable number of people online advocating going back to harsh restrictions, when in real life no one I know asks for that even when they are vulnerable. The reality is that there isn’t the public will to go back to restrictions like at the beginning of the pandemic, and the situation is better than it was. It would be impossible to stamp it out anyway, we just need to learn to live with it.
That’s probably the only real conclusion to draw from what I said, but I guess not quite what I said. I don’t really advocate that nothing should be done but I just can’t really see how it could given certain realities and I wonder to what end measures should be undertaken. That’s very similar I guess to “we just need to learn to live with it” but there’s an important acknowledgement there that I make which is that inaction, while perhaps inevitable, is going to lead consequences that we aren’t going to like.
There are better vaccines and antivirals coming out of the research pipeline. There are generics for Paxlovid coming on the market. In the short-term, mask and ventilate.
Covid is the third or fourth leading killer in the USA, right after heart disease and cancer, but liberals believe it no longer exists. They are literally killing themselves and everyone around them to keep the line up.
Are you wearing an n95 in every indoor public place? If not, your actions say that you no longer believe covid to be an issue. In your mind at least, because covid only affects the old and young and disabled and the poor, it might as well no longer exist.
Life is not black and white as you are trying to make it out to be.
In your mind at least, because covid only affects the old and young and disabled and the poor, it might as well no longer exist.
Not true. I know I could get it and suffer. But I no longer wear masks because the probability of that outcome is low, compared to the 100% probability of inconvenience with wearing a mask (fogging up my glasses, for example - I’ve never been able to stop that problem).
I also know the next time I get into a car, I could be in a very serious life-altering or life-ending crash. But I still ride in cars. Because the odds of a serious crash like that happening are low, and the convenience of riding in a car far outweighs that probability.
Everyone has to gauge their own risk levels for events and decide for themselves what is appropriate.
Do you wear a seatbelt? The sooner you admit to yourself that you’re a eugenicist, the happier you’ll be.
Do you use cars? Isn’t that being a eugenicist as well since you might kill someone doing it?
And here I thought I’d found the first hexbear I’ve seen who might argue things in good faith. Nope. I can’t wait until we can block whole instances at a user level. You guys aren’t adding anything useful to lemmy. Reading the things you post is like reading a “I’m 15 and I know everything” group.
Can you survive without a car (outside of like 2 major cities) in the USA? A better question would also be: can you survive without a mask while airborne AIDS is blowing around and turning people’s brains into Swiss cheese? You have at least a 10% chance of getting long covid each time you’re infected. And some of these people are bedridden. Like unable to even turn themselves over in bed. But it’s too hard to put on a mask. It’s too hard to conceptualize a world in which we work for each other and help each other rather than our bosses.
Actually, I would love to live in a car-free world. I would love to take trains, buses, and bicycles everywhere. But I can’t because of piece of shit liberals like yourself licking the boot of the capitalists who run the fucking USA. Bullet trains might save the planet from climate change, but then how are the investors in oil companies and car companies supposed to pay for their endless vacations? It’s such a hard choice! I, too, could be rich someday, even if the whole fucking planet is going to be incinerated long before that ever happens!
Reading the things you post is like reading a “I’m 15 and I know everything” group.
I’m 35, I have a spouse and kids, I’ve worked all kinds of jobs and lived for years in other countries. I’m telling you from my experience that you are placing yourself (and the people around you, including me) in incredible danger, all to help people like Biden and the Democrats who don’t give a fuck about you, who are paid to lose, and who think it’s weird that you’ll do what they want without even being told. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
They’re a fund raising tool for the troop, which is very transparent. Nobody is forcing you to buy them, but people love them and do so voluntarily. Where’s the scam?
I remember a time when i bought a printer and it came with refillable ink cartridges which worked out significantly cheaper and better for the environment.
The next printer i bought had microchips that identified the cartridges as being genuines so the cheap off brand ones didnt work anymore.
That was easily 15 years ago. Why is this only just coming back up now. Its beena scam for over a decade. Maybe longer.
Let’s not forget HP making an “update” that effectively self-destructed the printer for use if you don’t use their cartridges. Evem after the public outcry and back pedaling by the company with a new bios update, my printer still “manifested” the same problem they intentionally introduced.
Replaced parts, tried other things, then just said “forget it” and replaced it with a more expensive color laser from a competitor. Happiness and reliable printing ensued.
Land enclosure. Screwed everything up for everyone stg
Microtransactions in video games. Remember when everyone got pissed over horse armor?
Trading Card Games. The whole trading card thing is about psychologically manipulating you into buying shit you don’t need, shoulda been stamped out as soon as cigarette companies started doing it, but if you think about it the ideal capitalist institution sells you literally nothing and selling people heavy paper with little pictures on it is damn close to that ideal.
Software. Should be free, isn’t. Blame Bill Gates.
Advertising. We all know about propaganda (even though we might disagree on what is and isn’t propaganda at times) and we all know it’s bad, but we literally let rich people propagandize us every single day in every single orifice.
I forgot not everyone knows what free software means. Free as in freedom not free as in gratis. The other one has good, even great reasons for existing as you’ve said people need to pay the bills. The first one does not.
This definition of “free” in the context of software is used only in specific circles. It’s confusing for everyone else and another word should be used.
You like your free Android kernel? How about your free browser. Or MF’er, do you like this lemmy shit that you’re using?!?!?!? What about all the network architecture so you don’t have to pay dozens of owners so that you can send a packet of data from your the open-source router software to the Linux server that is hosting your game.
Make no mistake Microsoft has been at war with open source since its business model requires people to pay for software. It would destroy open source if it could, it it probably will after it acquires enough enough market share.
MF is your choice of term to open discussion with someone on a topic you disagree on? Surely this is going to get your audience to be open to accept your views/input.
Edit: the discussion likely is about your use case of the term free
I’m assuming uralsolo is talking about free software as in, software which gives users the four freedoms.
I don’t think all software needs to be free, but in some ways, it’s no longer the issue of the day. In this day and age, a lot of what we’re using is no longer really software. We’re using services with client-side Javascript which is nominally free software (but not really). Most of the actual software is sitting behind a server. I see this as good and bad. It means users of less popular operating systems get access to the same services as users of popular operating systems so long as they have browsers, and the negatives are, well…I’m sure you don’t need my help to think of some.
It’s hard to make money with free software because everyone has the right to commercially exploit it. For this reason alone, I don’t think it’s necessary for all software to be free, but I’ll be there to celebrate the programs that are free.
I need them because if I don’t have car insurance for example i get a fine. I need health insurance otherwise i have to pay out the ass. 2 stupid things made by some money hungry old fuckers that just want to collect even more money. This is just 2 examples of all kinds of insurance. The whole system is in place to make the rich richer for something meaningless.
I will say insurance companies can be very quick to fight you when it comes to giving out money. Keep at it and you’ll get something, but considering how long you can pay them month to month without using it, it’s obnoxious.
Except health insurance. Health insurance is a fucking racket, the medical industrial complex it ties into is a racket, and the United States would be a better place if it gutted this system
Cars = getting a job to pay for the gas, the taxes, the repairs, the taxes, the annual state inspection, the taxes, the (usually) annual registration fees, and the taxes!
(Although, you are still able to go places further away without having to get a ride from someone else. In that sense, you are still more free.)
Not sure that there is many ground types that turn onto proper, flat and wild road when hundreds of kilos of vehicules roll over two small tire-large paths. But who knows ? Maybe that’s just that my region soil that’s not car-friendly compared to other places.
It is now a minimum of, $1,000 in gas, $1,200 in insurance, and maintenance for a single year. At $2,200 a year, and I road a bus for 3 years at $28/mo or $336/year. I saved that $6,600 and purchased a car. Now I’m fucked with $2,200 year in expenses again. BUT I can drive to the beach if I wanna at a moments notice, so I guess I have that going for me.
The other half of this scam is the piss-poor public transport in a lot of countries, here in the UK if you’re not a Londoner the government could not care any less about carrots only sticks to get people out of cars.
The problem is that is used for illegal shit moslty. Be it the aformentioned or scams. And the problem is that money as a concept is centraliced and controled by whatever entity holds the most of whatever is based on, be it gold or whatever. It shouldnt but it is. And the whole " you better use reddit since you suck centraliced feet" thing, tho that i say to you grow up.
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